RE: [xml-dev] A standard approach to glueing together reusableXML fragments in prose?

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

Containment isn't the only way to model relationships in XML. It's just the most obvious. My response to Rick's mail has more on this. 

________________________________

From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
Sent: Wed 8/20/2003 8:30 AM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] A standard approach to glueing together reusableXML fragments in prose?




Yup.  The hierarchical approach that XML supports
allows you to not worry about the sometimes
challenging problem of figuring out what the keys
would be in a normalization that will allow you to get
back the information you put in.  It's sortof like the
fox and hedgehog: the relational model has a many
tricks for defining relationships among components,
but you have to be clever to use it well; XML has only
one trick ("containment") but it's a pretty powerful
one.  Of course, not all data fit the "natural tree
structure of XML" but a lot of interesting examples
do.

The downside, which I think is the point of this
thread (I haven't read the whole thing!) is that XML's
"one big trick" works best if the document as a whole
is the unit of analysis and storage.